MuseBlog

For times when you need HELP!!!

(You can read the 2010 edition here.)

Continued from 2010.

Whatever your medium, if it’s visual, here’s a place to talk about it, dream about it, or share ideas.

Continued from Visual Arts, 2010.

Words & names you ♥ or just want to talk about.

Continued from v. 2009.

White forfeits. New ratings: SudoRandom, 50; Radiant_Darkness, 140.

Inspection of the chess games on the blog found only one game (Tesseract vs. bookgirl_me) still in progress*. To keep things tidy going into the new year, the Chess GAPA (Robert) has adjudicated and closed all other games** of standard chess and calculated new MuseBlog Chess Ratings on the basis of the results. Ratings for Capablanca and Turbo Chess are unaffected.

Here are the new ratings, as of January 4, 2011 (numbers in parentheses indicate number of games on which the rating is based).

*(Finished on January 8; ratings updated to reflect the result.)

Latest update: 24 September 2011.

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As hobbits might put it, Professor Tolkien would have been eleventy-nine years old today.

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone,
When Tolkien woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.

The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Tolkien‘s Day.

Because life would be worse without verse.

Continued from version 2010.

You’ve waited with commendable patience. Now here it is at last for your delectation:

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The winter solstice occurs on December 21 at 2338 Universal Time. That’s 5:38 p.m. MuseBlog time (U.S. Central Standard Time), or 11:38 p.m. Icelandic time.

*Or summer, for our friends in the Southern Hemisphere.

By popular request (well, one request, anyway).

You can read all about the Breakthrough of the Year (and accompanying “Insights of the Decade” section) at Science‘s home page.

NOTE: Robert was neck-deep in all of this. Yes, like the other Administrators, he does have a job other than moderating MuseBlog.

Robert writes:

Our friend Pollyhymnia sent me a link to this YouTube video, which made my day. I’ve often doodled in math class, but never this productively:
 
 

If past Potter threads are any guide, this one will quickly grow as long as the book itself. Mind your spoiler warnings, please.

We wish you were here to enjoy it, and we’re sure you would have had interesting things to say about it.

Talk Like a Pirate Day 2010 may be just a happy memory, but you salty sea dogs still have an excuse to party. The conservation group Whale Times has declared today (October 20) “Hagfish Day” to celebrate all weird and/or ugly denizens of the sea. The group’s website (at www . whaletimes . org/HagfishDay . htm) features a gallery of underwater grotesques and directions for hagfish-related activities, some of them involving copious quantities of slime (a hagfish hallmark). Altogether Muserly, we deem.

Jadestone posted a long message about her adventures in Collegeland. We thought the subject merited a room of its own, so we’ve moved her comment from the Random Thread. Other collegians feel free to add your adventures.
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Imagine there were no Beatles? We can’t begin.

Brainstorming for National Novel-Writing Month, which coincides with November. If you’re unfamiliar with it, NaNoMuBlo-ers will be happy to explain.

The autumnal equinox takes place at 10:09 p.m. tonight (blogtime). To our European friends, it will be early Thursday morning. And down in the Southern Hemisphere, it’s spring! All very confusing, but that’s life.

By popular request. We’ve had Factoids threads before, but the Trivia-Off component is new.

A thread for exploring other ways things might have turned out, if the past had taken a different turn. Steampunk is one subgenre.

(Counterfactual: contrary to fact, not the way things actually are; retro: backward; future: future.)

We could be wrong, but we don’t think the requesters intended this to be an RPG.

Two years ago we posted a violin performance by long-time MuseBlogger Lizzie. Here is a more recent sample of her talent.

Spun off from the “do you remember?” discussions on the August random threads.

Here’s how the instigator, Cat’s Eye, describes it:

Relating our own experiences of “I remember I was” for 9/11, Michael Jackson’s death, Katrina? How it was for us when the Internet and iPods first started happening? Sort of pooling our remembered history?